Post on 28-Jan-2023
Jugged Hare
The house is in disarray. It has been two days since she
came back from the hospital. Following the black lines
through the dirty snow, the taxi had delivered her,
exhausted and shaky to a freezing house in the dark. The
curtains upstairs were still open as she had left them
that morning; two empty eyes that watched as she was
swallowed by the front door. She had been alone but that
meant everything was just as she’d planned it. Two days.
And still she can’t face the monumental task of putting
her home in order. She is cramping badly now. They told
her to expect some light spotting and pelvic discomfort
afterwards. Less than a period, nothing to worry about.
She is lucky; she caught it early enough. No messy D&E
for her. But this isn’t less than a period for she has
left behind the slippery thing that sluiced and sloshed
into a little glass vial. Ten minutes in all but time had
been askew. Bright, fine steel emptying its icy contents
into the cannula taped to the back of her hand,
submerging her in tarry blackness, stars bursting from a
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pinpoint of light, wheeling instantly overhead in milky
constellations. Then came a voice and a burning urge to
urinate. Now time is blurred and sharpens only when
children swerve into view. Two days. Time enough to pull
herself together. She sits at the kitchen table and tries
not to think of the skilled hands of the masked man in
the rubber apron who had inserted the thin metal rods
into her cervix to let the whirring machine pass through
to her uterus and peel her like an apple from the inside
out.
The more pressing concern of food needs to be
addressed but fatigue closes in on her again. She is in
stasis; stiff hands support a wearied head. Haunches and
elbows have quietly grown roots, wrapping themselves
around the chair. Spiralling downwards, they spread out
across the floor, pulling the morning along as they
disappear through the cracks in the floorboards. Placed
beside her is a porcelain mug of tea, its steam pushing
against the cold air. So much needs attending to.
Eyelines are broken by clutter. A knife-skewered block of
butter lies next to an empty milk bottle. Cereal bowls
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and jammy plates press school letters into the scrubbed
wood table. It had come to her in the cull from her
grandmother’s possessions. Her grandfather had lovingly
painted the pine a cornflower blue for a green bride in
an unchildrened life. Across decades of scrubbing down to
clean over and over, the paint had been rubbed away
leaving only tiny flecks of washed-out colour in marks
and dints embedded in the wood. She had never seen the
table painted, had only known her grandmother as an old
woman that had been squeezed out of life. And now it is
hers. Underneath, the crumbs of a hurried breakfast have
joined the hardened peas and clumps of drying mince stuck
in splashes of congealed gravy from last night’s dinner.
Bits wedge themselves between floorboards that run
straight across the kitchen. Clean lines join cooker to
cupboards to sink to fridge to table, ending abruptly at
the wide back doors that lead to the garden. Six chairs
cut across the symmetry, scattered where the children had
left them that morning as each were cajoled into the
daily race not to be late for school. Every chair is
painted a different colour and every child has its
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favourite. No matter how late they are, they battle to
sit in the seat they have claimed for their own.
On a chopping board at one end of the table a hare
lies waiting to be skinned and prepared. It has hung in
the scullery for three days above a bowl to catch the
blood. She had unhooked it in the crush of the morning to
laughing whoops of disgust. On their way to dress, four
children had trooped past it in single-filed mock
solemnity to tickle under its chin or shake a paw for
luck before taking the stairs and each other at a run.
Peter shot it the day before he left for London, the day
before she checked into the hospital. In the stillness of
the kitchen, she imagines its path intersecting with the
men who had gathered silently in the woods on a cold
Sunday morning, mouths wrapped in soft woollen scarves
against the cold, hats jammed down over their pink ears
and guns crooked over their camouflaged arms. A picture
is forming.
Frozen dawn in King’s Lynn. A hazy landscape absorbs
the muffled men and dampens their steps. They make their
way across fields splayed out under a dense, grey-bellied
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sky, heading for the cover of the woods beyond St Anne’s
smockmill. Hares are ground game, protected at night and
on Sundays so they tread carefully. Skeletal trees mark
the moorland boundary; icicles hang in glassy strips from
their flayed branches. The ground’s progress through the
trees is blocked by heavy mist. The pack of hunters moves
in quiet unison through the wood. Snowfall has
crystallised over night. Boots splinter the membrane of
ice and compact the snow. Breaths blow. Peter stops dead,
twists his trunk and raises a gloved finger to his masked
mouth. The hare doesn’t sense the danger. Using the
woodland to rest it has scraped its shallow form in a
snowless patch between hedgerow and ash trees. Lying
sleeping with ears pressed flat, it is almost
indistinguishable from the earth around it. Two soft
clicks at close range make it skitter across the snowy
ground. A flash of brown on white makes an easy target.
Just one shot needed with time to aim. The men’s
movements are unhurried. Cupped hands pass round a match.
Words bleed into the silence. Splashes of crimson show
the animal’s trajectory. Fragments of snow liquefy in the
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diminishing heat where it fell moulding an eerie parody
of its form. But now that life has been shaken out of the
hare, the trickle of water reforms quickly into ice.
She thinks that Peter would not register what she
can so vividly imagine: the tiny crunches of a thousand
fine hairs torn away from their ice shell as her husband
stoops to pick up dead meat. But his expert eye, she
knows, would see that it was female. His practiced hands
would feel along the abdomen; it is smooth, empty. Good.
It is January and mating season has just begun. She knows
that pregnant hares make Peter feel uneasy the way they
can endlessly reproduce, sometimes conceiving again
before the first leveret hit the ground with eyes open
and muscles taut. A litter every forty days from spring
to autumn. Superconception. Tied to the moon’s cycle.
Well, almost. She thinks of the time he’d had silently
come upon her, preparing the first hare he’d brought
home. Fingers snaking across her belly from behind,
pulling her gently backward. Heavy lips pressed to the
back of her neck, an ear keen to the hiss of breath
across teeth. Blood smeared on the back of his hand, then
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on his cheeks. They’d made love, right there, pushed up
against the kitchen table; a trace of the dead smell
rising up from the board, stitching itself to the scent
of her damp skin. Jugged hare; just what the doctor
ordered.
The memory brings her back to task. There is no fire
in the grate. The children had been dismayed to wake to a
cold kitchen, refusing to go back for jumpers and socks
until they’d got her voice to go scratchy. Sleep has lain
heavily on her for the last two nights, sludging her
through the earliest hours. She looks around at the
debris and wonders where to begin. The sink is full of
dirty dishes, the washing is piled high in the scullery
that doubles up as a laundry room, the bread and milk
need stowing so as not to spoil and that bloody hare
needs preparing. Stasis. Before anything else comes the
fire. The house is coffin cold and draughts are sneaking
in through every rickety sash window. Building a fire is
a much-loved ritual. First comes the grate. Dead charcoal
and ash are spilling out onto the black granite hearth.
The worst job. The sooty mess is scraped into a plastic
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bag then the hearth is washed and the grate reassembled,
emptied and clean. Now it gets good. Now she can build.
Now comes the yellowing paper; old news is never thrown
away. Now comes the kindling she had chopped up that
morning.
She had stolen out in the bitter silence of pre-dawn
to do it, moving quietly through the frozen garden,
Peter’s old greatcoat over her nightdress, oversized
socks stuffed into cold Wellingtons, an unlit cigarette
jutting from her mouth and a freshly made coffee burning
her knuckles and thumb, leaving a tiny trail in her wake,
like a toy train, a weak ghost. It is a job she loves.
But rituals had to be observed and the cigarette came
first. Shivering on the old chopping stool with her back
curled over her legs, arms jammed between thighs and
breasts, she had lit it, inhaled deeply and immediately
felt the familiar rush to her head. Fingertips tingled as
the sick feeling reached her cramping stomach. The
expelled smoke had fired onto the frosted grass and
lingered about her, keeping low to the ground. No one
knows she smokes. She thinks perhaps Peter might suspect
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but he doesn’t chide her, and out there, in the darkness,
she had lifted the cigarette in salute to his complicity.
She doesn’t smoke much these days but kindling, coffee
and a cigarette is a holy triptych. As the coffee had
cooled, she thought about the children, sleeping heavily
in their beds behind the drawn curtains, unaware that
their mother was partially obscured by a toxic mist just
five hundred yards or so from where they lay. Cigarette
finished too quickly, she had picked up the axe. The cold
handle was smooth and familiar under her touch. Hard,
echoing sounds had darted from the deep within the wood
as blows were struck on thick stumps. It had taken four
thumps on the ground with the blade wedged firmly inside
before she had heard splintering. Now she had mastered
the branch. Now it would be easy to transform into fine
slivers that will ignite like hair on the fire.
Now comes the coal. Her mother would arrange the
coals around the kindling, tonging one chunk after
another into the gaps between the sticks. For years she
has done the same. It is only lately she understands that
if she’s done good enough job with the paper and
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kindling, the coal will smoulder and smoke and catch
anyway. It doesn’t stand a chance on such a well-arranged
stack. So these days she dumps a whole load of it on the
fire, two or three pieces bouncing out of the grate.
Today, though, the scuttle is too heavy so she packs the
grate with kindling, lights the paper and goes to the
dusty vegetable dish high on the kitchen shelf to get her
cache of cigarettes. Kneeling down close to the flames
that are beginning to grow, she lights one, sucking the
tip with eyes closed. Her smoke tendrils over and around
the icy white smoke from the freshly cut kindling before
vanishing, pulled up by the wind blowing faintly across
the chimney pot. Without the coals to weight it down, the
fire is too hot too quickly. She can’t get near enough to
draw the cigarette smoke up and away. She wants more
minutes to think of other things than the daily chores
that have to be done and done again. The half-smoked
cigarette is flung into the fire.
It ignites almost instantaneously in the white heat.
In a few seconds all that is left is an ashy imprint
still holding its shape, two thin green bands still
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discernible on the filter. Snatching up the scuttle, she
empties half of it over the remains of the cigarette and
immediately feels the chill from the fire. The heat won’t
come back until the coals are puffing their greasy yellow
smoke. She looks again at the hare on the board. Peter
has already left the first of the blood in a small
Tupperware pot in the fridge. There is a smear of brown
near the hinge and a thumbprint on the top. It would
finish the dish. The blood made the sauce richer, gave it
a deep colour and left its mark in a gravy that would be
mopped up with great swipes of bread crammed between the
fists of ravenous children. Not today, though. Today she
had dumped the whole lot into the sink. The sticky mess
had pooled around the drain, rising for a moment before
being belched away; a splatter of water to help it go
down. She means to get up and start skinning the hare but
another contraction jags as she half-stands. Its
immediacy makes her gasp. Her body freezes for just a
second, knees bent like a diver, hands bearing down on
her thighs, and then sags, reaching instead for the
cigarette packet on the hearth. The coal will take ten
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minutes to get going, more than enough time to smoke a
couple.
She thinks again about the meaty thing that is no
longer any part of her where only two days ago it had
been living inside of her, feeding off her body, swelling
her breasts and belly. ‘Do you want to know the sex in
case you feel a bit … afterwards, you know?’ a middle-
aged nurse had asked her on Monday. ‘You’ll be all right
love,’ she said as she whooshed the needle full of
clonidine into the vein on her outstretched arm. ‘It’ll
be over in a jiffy. Helps the general go better.
Certainly helps with post-op shivering and you won’t feel
so sick.’ She had felt sick, though, not for a dead thing
but the live ones she couldn’t be late back for. She had
planned it; planned a house that was lit from within, a
fire in the grate, a tired ear to half-listen to their
chatter of different dinners and other routines. The dark
that made the house melt into the night had been
banished. As a child she had always been scared of empty
black houses. They were like dead things trapping lonely
ghosts in their rooms. She had turned on the lamps, the
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overhead lights too harsh, too much of a reminder of
another room with lights like little moons in the shape
of petals or a plug hole beaming down a too-clean light
on her. She can feel the soft throbs from deep within her
as she pulls on the cigarette. It feels as though her
vagina seems to open, to bend around tiny bloody
jellyfish that need to be pushed through and out, getting
snagged on the sanitary pad. But they are ghost fish; the
pad is clean. The pulsing sensation ends in nothing. She
feels like she is haemorrhaging: lightheaded and fevery.
She felt like this after all the other pregnancies. Post-
partum bleeding. Breastfeeding made it worse. Sticky,
serrated contractions. Nothing to worry about. Post-op
cramping. Nothing. Squatting there in the silence, she is
accompanied only by the soft rhythm of her movements.
Pull on the cigarette, pumping womb, in and out, in and
out, ebb and flow, except there is no flow. What is that
old proverb? Tide and Time. Seasons not the sea. The
coals are growing too hot to smoke anymore. She’ll look
at the pad in a minute. The stairs are too heavy just
now.
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She thinks again about Peter leaving two days ago
for London in the dark. A chemical sleepiness had netted
her in heaviness, closing her inward. He had kissed her
softly in the silence and she’d struggled to wake up. One
hand had brushed strands of hair from her sticky face;
tender fingers had tidied the tangles behind her ear.
‘See you Friday. Try to rest,’ he’d breathed into her
neck. Then he was gone. Swallowed by the taxi blinking
its hazards in the street. She is sure that he’d felt sad
to leave her like this and would have gone through it
again in his mind as he stood waiting in the dark on the
station platform wondering if it was something he had
done. But this Monday was different; she had other things
on her mind and had to steel herself to what lay ahead of
her. It would take a special kind of courage to do what
she had to do. She had told no one. She was booked in
straight after the school run. Logistics had been worked
out. The children were all at play dates and would be
getting dropped off later that evening. Everything
depended on her not having any complications or
hysterics. She couldn’t afford to be late home for the
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children. She needed to get over the anaesthetic quickly.
Being kept under observation was out of the question. Her
whole story would unravel if she weren’t there when the
children came home. She’d had to lie to the hospital to
tell them that a friend was coming over to see her
through the night or she would never have been allowed to
go home. The anaesthetic might have some effects
throughout the evening. She might hallucinate, might be
nauseous, certainly she would be sleepy they had told her
and couldn’t be trusted on her own.
A school clock ticks into the silence. The hare
needs attention. Time to stand up. White circles of dust
are printed on her knees as she walks to the table where
it lies on its side, paws crossed one over the other,
head back and ears up. For a moment she can’t face doing
it. It has a flattened look, like it is slowly dissolving
into the board. With one hand on the scruff of the neck
and the other cupping its rump, she lays it on its back
and the legs fall open. Immediately, the old feelings
kick in. It is just a hare. She has done this a thousand
times before. The utensils needed to do the job lie
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readied: one heavy black-handled carving knife, a
smaller, lighter pairing knife and a clean cloth to wipe
her hands are all lined up in a row next to the carcass.
Feeling her way up from the flanks to the ribcage, across
chest and down to the belly, her cold fingers are warmed
with the first contact but it is a false warmth of fur
that comes from a dead thing. Pinching the skin at the
loose part low down on the belly she makes the first
incision. This will get her inside, under the furry
wrapping. It is a clean cut done with precision. There is
no shitty smell. Peter has managed to avoid a gutshot.
Good. She takes extra care not to puncture the stomach
lining. The intestines need to come in one gulping part,
not in bits and pieces of shit and undigested food. Now
the belly meat is exposed; ropey, grey muscles she can
trace with her fingertips. She knows just by touch the
difference between the muscles and the more yielding
intestines. So familiar is the feeling that she can shut
her eyes and know exactly what is under her hand. Her
grandmother had shown her how. She was ten the first
time. Under the old woman’s watchful eye, she slipped her
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hand into the gap between skin and meat, her little
fingers sliding over unfamiliar knots and curves. She
gently pulls apart the skin all around the belly, fingers
easing it softly from the meat, until she has enough in
her grasp to pull. One hard tug up and down and it is
off. Easy, like pulling off a sock. Ping. The effort
makes her womb contract. Hot shards snake through her
abdomen.
The pain has come back in radiating waves that for a
moment defeats her into a childhood where she’d fallen
short between back step and wall and collided shin to
brick. Cutting off the head and legs will have to wait
until she can check. She can do it right here, standing
next to the table. Less bother than a period. No climbing
the stairs to deal with warm seepages in freezing
bathrooms. No leaking pads and pubic hair encrusted with
dried blood. No hoisting up her skirt and mounting the
bath. No crouching down and splaying her legs to cup
tepid water to herself. No stained towel and tights and
pants to soak. No extra washing to be done. Cold seeps
onto her belly as she lifts her skirt and bunches the
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tights forward in her fist. Spotting. Nothing more.
Middle and ring fingers slide down to her vagina and
press lightly around. She doesn’t like touching herself
there. In her mind it feels raw, damaged. She needs to
pee now but is scared to do it because of the feeling she
has had since she woke up from the anaesthetic, like
she’s been mangled and wants to keep things inside, not
let them drain away.
A snap of elastic brings her back to the board.
Washed hands are dried on the clean white cloth. The hare
lies there in its furry hat and boots. Picking up the
heavy kitchen knife she severs the head in one go. The
blow ends in a dull crack that she feels through her
tendons. Sometimes she will use the head in the stock but
she doesn’t feel like cutting it in half today and
fishing it boiled and stringy from the pot later so she
leaves it gazing up at her through clouded eyes on the
chopping board. The feet don’t need either knife. A quick
snap, like twigs, and they are free. She discards the
skin and throws it in the grate. The orange coals devour
the skin whole in one greedy bite. The smell of singeing
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hair is instantly carried away up the flue. Her
grandmother used to keep the skins, drying them until she
had enough for a blanket. It took about fifty skins to
make the blankets that covered their beds as children.
Squabbling siblings were pressed to sleep by the squashy
weight of warm fur.
She makes a start on the intestines. First she has
to cut through the groin in order to reach them.
Concentration is needed to rip through the lining of the
stomach without piercing its contents. Skilled hands
guide the smaller paring knife to prick the fragile
membrane and the first puncture mark shows everything in
order below, nothing leaking, no unpleasant smell, just
good clean meat. By the age of eleven, she was receiving
her grandmother’s praise for her attention to detail and
control with a knife. The old woman’s hands had succumbed
to arthritis and she was told that her delicate fingers
could do the job much better. Peeling back the stomach
lining she feels her way to the innards and begins the
paunching. Pulling gently, the stomach sac comes out in
one smooth fluid motion. Time is moving quickly now. A
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neat ‘v’ incision to the groin and the tail comes away.
The dark red organs are next. The liver and kidneys are
slippery under her fingers; the hardness of the heart
always surprises her, so hard for something so small. A
chipped white bowl catches the blood that seeps from the
hole that housed the liver. Cold blood, leaking out on
its own with no pulse to pump things along. She carefully
checks over the organs. Any white spots or lumps will
show that the animal is spoiled and will have to be
thrown away but everything is in order, dark red and
clean. A good eating hare.
Nearly there. Just a rinse under cold water to wash
everything clean and it will be ready to joint. She makes
an effort to find the metal shot that has killed the hare
but it is buried too deeply in the muscle tissue. No
matter, she will tell the children to watch out as they
eat. As a child she loved to find the hard metal pellets
in the stew. Her grandmother had closed in on her,
brittle fingers indenting white circles on her soft
forearm, whispering that they’d come to her bowl as a
present for doing such a good job cleaning the hare. She
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wanted to keep the little balls but her mother had made
her throw them away, ignoring her protests. The viscera
are wrapped tight as a mummy in newspaper and thrown
straight into the bin so no foxes will come sneaking in
the night driven mad by the smell of fresh meat.
The last bit. Jointing. The hind legs are first. She
caresses the body until she finds the place where the
hind legs balled into sockets and feels for the hard
pelvic bone joined to the groin. Denting the meat with
her finger to mark the spot, she stands on tiptoes to
make sure her weight will bring the carving knife down in
one clean snap. The crunch and soft thump on the board
tells her that she has done it. The legs are detached
with ease, popping easily from their sockets, sliced
through and placed side by side on the board. Peter’s
hunter eye had aimed forward and the meat is undamaged.
Hind leg meat is the money cut, he would say. She turns
her attention to the pelvis, which is chopped up and put
next to the legs. The saddle is always difficult and
requires concentration. It is encased in layers of thin
membrane and they will have to be removed delicately, in
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strips so as not to damage the meat underneath. That
takes time. With the point of the paring knife she lifts
up little flaps until she can nip them between her
fingers. Slowly, each strip is pulled back. A quick
twitch and the sinewy ribbons are pulled free. Once,
twice, three times, all in mechanical order. The last
layer of silver skin is the toughest and her womb spasms
as it is pared away. The pain snags across her middle. No
matter. Nearly done. The peeled saddle is sliced deftly
in two. Finished. Now on her board are two shoulders, two
legs and the chopped up saddle. Time lurches forward and
her kitchen clicks into gear with a cold January
afternoon in King’s Lynn. The rest is a cinch. Onions,
carrots, potatoes – skinned and peeled, chopped and
thrown into her round-bellied metal pot along with a
fistful of rosemary and sage. Splash in some water, set
it to simmer. Easy. Not jugged hare, exactly, but still.
And there it is, done. Just one more cigarette
before she starts clearing away the mess. Then out into
the icy twilight to bring them all home. The house will
soon expand as children run in from the cold: bright hats
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